The Origin: the PIXHAWK student project (2008)

A decade ago, “Pixhawk” was a student project at ETH Zurich. Little did the team know that it would end up having such a large influence on the drone industry. During this time, the team created MAVLink, Pixhawk, PX4, and QGroundcontrol — which are today’s most used standards for flight control hardware and autopilot software in the drone industry. This was the beginning of a story of a very successful open source project outperforming individual corporate development.

Manufactured by Drotek, and based on FMUv4, the Pixhawk 3 Pro is intended for space constrained applications with sufficient I/O for most applications without expansion and can function as a modular multi-board flight controller.

Manufactured by mRobotics, and based on FMUv4, the mRo PixRacer R14 is sized for FPV racing but has all the inputs necessary for a fully featured autopilot system and has built in WiFi for convenience.